NEF’s Newest Intern–Kondwani M’dale

Never Ending Food’s newest intern, Kondwani M’dale, comes from a nearby village known as Mazoni. He was introduced to Never Ending Food through his interest in reading about Permaculture. We maintain a small lending-library of resource materials, and Kondwani was coming every couple of weeks to check out new books. Seeing that his passion to learn about Permaculture ideas was genuine, he began spending more time with our Manager, Peter Kaniye, and our other intern, Jacob Jumpha.

We took Kondwani on as an intern back in March of this year, and for the past five months, he has been coming three days a week to learn more about the implementation of Permaculture designs. His practical experience has involved learning about Permaculture ‘zones and guilds’, regenerative soil management (e.g. compost making, mulching, worm farming, the making of liquid manure, etc), water management (building swales, rain-water harvesting, banana pits, etc), nursery establishment, seed-saving, solar drying, eco-sanitation, and much more.

Kondwani speaking about plastics and Permaculture

In June, Kondwani was part of the team which represented Never Ending Food at the anti-plastic campaign held in Malawi’s capital city of Lilongwe. At this function, he gave a public address on how Permaculture aims to achieve ‘zero-waste’ and the importance of reducing, reusing, recycling, and refusing plastics. He was also able to show the audience some of the products that he and Jacob Jumpha make using recycled plastic bags (e.g. mats, hats, bags, shoes, etc).

At Kondwani’s own home, he has been working to establish Permaculture designs. Despite several challenges, including neighbors who continue to over-sweep and burn organic matter, poor community animal management, and a reluctance by many to try new ideas, Kondwani has started small and is working every day towards bigger and better things. Below are a few of the design ideas that he has been able to achieve:

Zone One–protected from chickens and using hanging gourd pots!

Eco-sanitation–a composting toilet using two 1-meter pits and a movable wooden platform.